Hitesh Gautam

I am a software developer and would like to leverage the disruptive power of technology to change lives. When I started my engineering, I did not know how to code but I worked very hard in my first couple of months to be a good programmer. Then one day I found out that some of my seniors had qualified for Google Summer of Code. I got very curious and on further exploration, found that the program was perfect to hone my skills as a young developer. I decided to crack the program in my first year of undergraduation itself. My classmates weren’t very supportive of my resolve but I knew there was only one way forward - to commit all my efforts towards this goal. While exploring projects to work on, Android app development seemed quite exciting field as it provided me with a way to reach billions of users and thus create huge social impact- after I got to know that how applicative development can help the community. Little do we tend to relate the paradigms of technology and social impact. But if brought together, the amalgamation can bring an avalanche of solutions in the way society deals with the problems. I wanted to work on a relatively hard project in a good organization so that it may challenge my limits and also help me hone my skills as a software developer. So I chose Apache Foundation and worked tremendously for several months before the program even started. My future mentors were impressed with my commitment. Not only did I start working on the project ideas early on, I also gave my own inputs to improve the overall structure and features of the project. All this led to my selection into the program in my very first year!

This motivation for a social change through technology prompted me to delve into the field of social entrepreneurship, which is when I happened to join a community of doers and established an AI-based online marketplace, ‘Lithics.in’ which is an exclusive platform in India to give a market channel for the underserved communities. One thing led to another and I co-founded a technology company and developed my first AI-based android application 'Precisely' which launched with a bang and registered over 900 impressions in its first release!

Precisely is one of the most complex project I have ever worked on and most proud of. Precisely is a mobile first platform which helps youth search and discover the latest personalised academic and professional opportunities with the help of machine learning and data science. Precisely combines collaborative human opinions with machine learning of preferences within an intuitive framework to separate music from the noise. Precisely’s backend utilises the power of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to intelligently scrape and transform important but unstructured data of opportunities from various partner websites into categories of meaningful information which can be intuitively consumed by the users. The exuberant team of developers at Precisely headed by me have also created a novel machine learning based secret sauce which combines various recommendation techniques including collaborative filtering and Recurrent Neural Networks to automatically analyse how each user prefers interacting with the app and its opportunities. This provides users an experience personalized specifically to their needs and preferences. Now ‘Precisely’ has over 15,000 downloads and over 6000 happy active users in over 20 countries!